Bus Carrying Elderly Storm Evacuees Explodes Near Dallas

WILMER, Tex., Sept. 23 - A bus carrying elderly evacuees from an assisted living center in Houston was rocked by multiple explosions on its way to Dallas early this morning, killing at least 24 elderly residents.

The bus was carrying 45 people - 38 residents, 6 staff members and the driver - from the Brighton Gardens assisted living center in Bellaire, a suburb southwest of Houston, when it caught fire on Interstate 45, the main highway connecting Dallas and Houston. The explosions occurred near Wilmer, a suburb about 15 miles from downtown Dallas.

Witnesses and local officials said smoke, possibly from the brakes, had forced the driver to pull over to the side of the road before at least three explosions covered the bus in flames at about 7 a.m. Central time.

Traffic behind the bus stopped immediately and was backed up 17 miles within 10 minutes and more than 20 miles shortly thereafter. People jumped out of their cars and tried to get into the bus, breaking through the windows, to get people out. At least a dozen people got out of the bus alive and were sent to Dallas-area hospitals. At least nine of them ranging in age from 78 to 101 were at Parkland Hospital with eight in fair condition, said Melissa Turner, a spokeswoman for the county-run hospital. (The condition of the ninth patient was unavailable this afternoon.)

A Dallas County sheriff's official said residents' oxygen tanks appear to have contributed to the explosions and made it hard for rescue workers - which included a sheriff's deputy and emergency medical technicians - to get to people trapped in the bus. "The oxygen canisters ignited causing multiple explosions and making it too hot to get anyone else off at that point," said Don Peritz, a spokesman for the sheriff.

The first sheriff's deputy to arrive on the scene struggled to guide people out of the bus. "The sheriff's deputy trying to get people off the bus used his flashlight, telling passengers to 'Follow the light' and some of them did but not all of them could," said John Wiley Price, a Dallas County commissioner, the county equivalent of a city council member in Texas.

Harry Wilson, 78, was among the first to be rescued from the bus because he was the last one to get on the bus the day before, said his son, Jeffrey. The older Mr. Wilson is paralyzed on his left side from a stroke he suffered last year. He was taken to Parkland Hospital after the bus explosion.

"I am happy my dad is O.K.," said the younger Mr. Wilson, who turned 47 today and had flown in from Tampa, Fla., planning to meet his father when the bus arrived. "He has dodged a lot of bullets in his life. He is more concerned right now about everybody else - his friends on board."

Fred Witte, who owns a salvage yard about a block away from the place where the bus exploded, walked to the scene after seeing the smoke. "I looked down there and there was smoke coming up and then there was fire and I said 'Oh my god, that's a bus,' " he said. "I heard hollering, people saying 'Over here.' I looked down and there were about 15 or 20 old people. One lady was shaking real bad."

Mr. Witte said emergency medical workers gave at least one woman oxygen and he helped get a blanket for an amputee with one leg.

An official for Sunrise Senior Living, the Virginia-based company that owns Brighton Gardens, said none of the center's employees were among the dead. She said the assisted living center, which houses about 140 residents, had chartered at least two buses to take residents to the company's three assisted living centers in Dallas. The other bus arrived safely, said Sarah Evers, a spokeswoman for Sunrise. Some other residents had been evacuated by family members earlier in the week.

"They were evacuating in advance of Hurricane Rita, which was predicted to affect the community," Ms. Evers said. "Resident safety was our primary concern. We are absolutely shocked and saddened by what happened."

The bus left Brighton, part of which is also a nursing home, on Thursday at 3 p.m., taking 15 hours to cover a distance Texas residents drive frequently in under five hours during normal conditions. Ms. Evers said the facility's management decided to evacuate Tuesday night after being asked to do so by local fire officials who were concerned about flooding, which Bellaire has been susceptible to in past storms. But the bus did not leave until Thursday, after relatives had had a chance to retrieve their family members.

Sunrise said it contracted with a Chicago-based bus service, the Bus Bank, to provide transportation for its residents. The company, whose officials did not immediately return phone calls, appear to have subcontracted the work to Global Limo Inc., a small bus firm based in Pharr, Tex., near the Mexican border.

Employees who answered the phone at Global Limo declined to comment saying they had been advised by an attorney not to answer any questions. "We'll issue a public statement probably tomorrow," a woman who answered the phone said.

Global Limo has six buses and 10 drivers, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency that regulates buses. The company's safety record warranted a investigation in August, but it was unclear if one has been performed.

The National Transportation Safety Board has sent investigators to Dallas to investigate the explosion.

Health care facilities have to follow national guidelines on how they store and use oxygen, which is not flammable on its own but can feed a fire or allow other compounds to burn at a lower temperature, said Burton Klein, a health care fire, and electrical safety consultant based in Boston. Moreover, pressurized oxygen canisters can rupture in hot temperatures.

"A whole host of things worked against them," Mr. Klein said. "It wasn't just the oxygen or the overheating of the brakes."

Mr. Klein said there are federal regulations on shipping oxygen, but he does not know of any rules governing the use and storage of the gas on private buses. Commercial airlines and Amtrak restrict the use of oxygen canisters.

A few hours after the explosions, the bus was a charred skeleton of itself and the stench of burning rubber was intense across six lanes of highway. Local officials quickly moved the bus to a county bus and truck depot nearby with the 24 bodies still onboard. The bodies were later removed and put into a refrigerated truck owned by the county medical examiner's office.

Mr. Price, the county commissioner, said it could take "as much as three to four weeks to get the remains identified" because coroners would have to use dental and tissue records to identify the charred remains.

At least two people on the bus had been previously evacuated from Sunrise facilities near New Orleans before Katrina made landfall, Mr. Price said. Ms. Evers, the Sunrise official, confirmed that some residents were brought to the Brighton facility from Louisiana but could not say how many of those people were on the bus. Traffic was trickling along to Dallas by 11 a.m. local time. Images of the flaming bus were broadcast on live local television and picked up on national cable news channels.

In Bellaire and Houston, local officials defended the decision to encourage residents to evacuate.

Mayor Cindy Siegel of Bellaire said the city remains worried about storm-related damage to power lines and the prospect of flooding. "Brighton Gardens was following their evacuation procedures," she said at a news conference. "If you recall 24 hours ago we expected to take the full brunt of Hurricane Rita. I think all of us recall that just in recent weeks events of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Alabama and Mississippi - that those people with special needs that weren't addressed and how many people lost their lives."

More than 60 people died in nursing homes that were not evacuated when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama last month.

Ms. Evers of Sunrise said the company evacuated its two facilities in the New Orleans area before Hurricane Katrina struck without incident. Based in McLean, Va., Sunrise operates about 420 facilities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany.

Mayor Bill White of Houston insisted that a mandatory evacuation order applied only to low-lying areas and not the city as a whole.

As they did Thursday night, the mayor and other officials told people living in the "voluntary evacuation" area, which includes most of metropolitan Houston, to stay off the highways and at home - that it was too late to try to escape the storm and their safest bet was to hunker down at home.

The elderly, especially those that need constant medical supervision are often at the greatest risk of death and serious injury during hurried evacuations, according to health experts. The average temperature in Dallas and Houston was 81 degrees this morning and has since climbed to 96 degrees.

In addition to the people who died in the explosion, at least one other 82-year-old woman died of dehydration while stuck in traffic in the stifling heat near the town of Cleveland, a town about 45 miles northeast of Houston.

Highways out of Houston have been clogged with more than two million people headed to Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and elsewhere.